Family History News and Views from Lisa Louise Cooke, host of The Genealogy Gems Podcast at www.GenealogyGems.com

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

R.I.P. Google News Timeline

I'm sorry to report that on August 17, 2011 Google quietly closed down one of my favorite Google Labs tools - the Google News Timeline with two simple sentences:

"As part of the phasing out of Google Labs, we have shut down Google News Timeline. It was a pleasure to serve you!"

Google News Timeline is not to be confused with Google News Archive. Google did also recently announce that they were discontinuing newspaper digitization efforts, but that the Google News Archive would remain in tact as is. Those digitized newspapers were also fed through the Google News Timeline which I considered a superior way to view the newspapers.

Since the Timeline had not been officially launched, it was kept where beta-baby tools were kept: in Google Labs. I say "were kept" because Google Labs is also now defunct.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I'm devastated. I just now (2-28-13) discovered your genealogy gems website and watched the video for the google news timeline only to find that it has died before I had a chance to discover it. Well, such is life. Back to the drawing board.

Google is having a hard time holding onto really good things they create. Perhaps if they spent a little time and effort on showing off their products instead of making the end user find the secret path to them, they would have a loyal group of google users. I miss the good old google days already. This does not bode well for Google.